virtualbox.org

<mod note>I'm terribly sorry. Mods have the power to edit other users messages, and in your case I accidentally hit "edit" instead of "quote" and overwrote your OP! I have no undo, and no exact memory of what you wrote. Hopefully my reply below is useful to you, but it would be nice if you edited this message and restored some semblance of your original question.

No probs Mod,

luckily i had it saved in a sticky

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Hi all,

I think I've scoured as many places as possible and am unable to find a solution, so I come cap in hand hoping someone can point me in the right direction or better yet, show me how to fix my issue (tech issue anyway)

I know there maybe some issues arising from what i am about to describe so please spare me a little as this is my last ditch attempt to save years of critical files and settings so am willing to try anything at this point unfortunately.

So basically I'm trying to boot up a copy of previously crashed hdd which I've managed to save virtually and now hoping to boot it up in order to copy off or copy some file settings that took me ages to configure on my Mac OSX Tiger(10.4.11).

So far this has been the order of play:

1. Mac OSX Tiger (10.4.11), mid 2007 iMac, intel core duo 2, 3GB Ram, 300 GB HDD

2. Hdd Started failing and eventually crashed with no way to recover

3. To test backup strategy i recall making a hdd copy with carbon copy cloner late last year which i have managed to find (named it something like maxosx_nov2011.sparsefile)

4. Replaced hdd myself with 1TB hdd, no original disk so decided to upgrade to OSX Lion 10.7.3 (actually, snow leopard and then upgrade)

5. Converted sparsefile to dmg and then to iso so that I could perhaps boot in VirtualBox(actually not sure if conversion steps necessary, but managed to do a "VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI maxosx_nov2011.iso")

6. started up virtualbox and it looks like its about to boot which gets me very excited and then this:

Waiting on <dict ID="0"><key>IOProviderClass</key><string ID="1!>IOResources</string><key>IOResourceMatch</key><string ID="2">boot-uuid-media</string></dict>
Still waiting for root device
Still waiting for root device
Still waiting for root device
Still waiting for root device

Looking through the forums I see similar topics have been raised before, but not with my specific issue. If I am wrong please correct me or direct me to read over again.

So in a nutshell, what I want to do is this boot Mac Tiger 10.4.11(saved as iso/dmg) as a guest OS.

I hope any of you gurus can help, I would be really apprieciative!

Thanks for any help in advance

Why can't you just double-click on the sparseimage or sparsebundle you created with CCC and have it mount as a disk image on your 10.7 desktop, then just copy off the files you want to get to. No VirtualBox necessary for that.

hi rpmurrary,

Thanks for your reply. Basically, I run music software which has config settings within the software itself which I cannot replicate in the new environment that i have now (Lion). So Im praying that I can somehow run the .vdi i created and then do a software export of all necessary files including config so that settings are taken out exactly as they were set. Then I can do an import into the new environment. I am happy that I've now backed up other files which is kind of good, but these song files I have (within Logic Pro), I'll die without (ok, maybe not die but you get the picture).

I hope I made sense,

Thanks again

I can't say whether this will work because I've never tried it but you could do the following:

Start off by trying to create a guest of OS X. It doesn't matter how big a hard drive you create since you won't be using it so make it a small one. The easiest thing to do would be to just use the defaults. Make sure that in the Settings > System > Motherboard that you enable EFI and change the boot order so that the CD/DVD-ROM comes first. Under the Acceleration tab enable VT-x.

Then attach your iso file to the CD/DVD-ROM in Settings > Storage. Highlight Host Drive under the IDE controller section on the left and on the right enable Passthrough and click on the CD icon beside the dropdown menu where it should have IDE Primary Master. Select "Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file" and choose your iso file.

Now try to start the guest you've created and see if it boots from the iso file (assuming that the iso file was created properly).

monit0r wrote:Converted sparsefile to dmg and then to iso so that I could perhaps boot in VirtualBox(actually not sure if conversion steps necessary, but managed to do a "VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI maxosx_nov2011.iso")

That command will embed an ISO 9660 CD filesystem on a virtual hard disk. The hard disk would not be usable like that.

Most users seem to have weird notions of what an ISO image is. An ISO is an image of an optical disk (i.e. CD or DVD). Period. An image of a hard disk is NOT an ISO, it uses the wrong file format and will not be recognized as an ISO by any software that understands ISOs. The extension you give to the file is meaningless. Likewise, if you do have a genuine ISO then it is only good for transferring as an image onto CD or DVD. It is not directly usable as an image you can restore your hard disk from. Install CDs have special software on them: making an ISO does not make an install CD.

So lets back up several steps: any disk image backup software worth its salt will come with a bootable CD or some similar mechanism for booting a PC which has a dead or blank hdd. You boot off your disk cloner CD and follow it's instructions to restore the backup image (which will probably need to be held on a USB drive). To restore into a VM you make an ISO image of the cloner CD and boot the VM from the ISO image. The restore will only work if its a whole disk clone rather than a partition clone (I'm not familiar with the exact software you use: it may or may not offer the option to back up disks or selected partitions only).